Beautiful Kaitlyn is our second daughter. We were so thrilled when we found out I was pregnant with Kaitlyn and that my elder daughter (M) would be getting a sister. My pregnancy and delivery with M were fairly straightforwardand she was born in the water after a 15 hour labour, 9 of which were spent at home. I had an absolutely textbook pregnancy with Kaitlyn too. Thirty-nine and a half weeks of dreaming of my new girl, and the relationship she would form with her sister. In all honesty I formed an even stronger bond with Kaitlyn during pregnancy than I did with M, perhaps because this was my second pregnancy and so I felt I knew what I was doing, knew what it was to have a baby at home and what that bond would materialise into. We did have a slightly more difficult start in the first trimester than I did with M, but two early pregnancy scans confirmed that all seemed well, and from then on everything progressed as expected with never so much as a high blood pressure reading.
I spent my pregnancy talking constantly to Kaitlyn in my head. She was there for my weekly choir rehearsals, and I knew she liked all the same pieces of music as me as she would kick in my tummy. She was a right wriggler, which her sister wasn’t at all. My pregnancy with M saw me hooked up to that CTG machine more than I care to recall; Kaitlyn’s movements, however, never caused me any concern. She had a regular pattern like clockwork and I even felt her kicking and moving not very long before we found out she had died. M and I both love to sing, and I dreamed of Kaitlyn joining us inmaking up silly songs around the house. She was a well-travelled baby – France, Portugal and Germany in just a few short months.
And then the day that every parent hopes that they never have to live through. After having been in the pre-labour stage for over a day and a half I was concerned that something wasn’t right. I had expected labour with a second baby to progress much more quickly. But we didn’t in our worst nightmares expect that anything was so very seriously wrong. We went into hospital to hear the words “I’m so sorry, I can’t find a heartbeat.” Those words will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Since I was already in labour we didn’t have very much time at all to plan Kaitlyn’s arrival. But thanks to the wonderful support of the midwives looking after us, we were able to spend time making memories with Kaitlyn. We gave her a bath and dressed her in a light blue baby grow, one of the few that was bought specially for her rather than being passed down from M. I brushed her gorgeous full head of soft, dark hair. We took her for a beautiful autumn walk in the pram; I hadn’t realised how much I had been looking forward to pushing a pram again. We cuddled for hours and hours, I lay on the bed with her just like I did all those months I spent co-sleeping with M. Kaitlyn met her grandparents and her aunt and uncle. She also spent some precious time with M, who coped remarkably and loved meeting her little sister. I committed to my memory every detail of Kaitlyn’s body, her perfect hands and feet, and her nose just like her sister’s.
We opted for Kaitlyn to have a post mortem; a difficult thing to think of my poor girl going through, but we had to know that we had done all we could to find some answers. We also felt we had to know that there wasn’t anything to worry about regarding M, however small the possibility. The post mortem revealed that Kaitlyn was affected by an issue with the placenta, a condition called Fetal Vascular Malperfusion (previously called Fetal Thrombotic Vasculopothy up until 2015). In our case, a number of small blood clots were found on Kaitlyn’s side of the placenta, which also affected her growth. Kaitlyn’s birth weight was 6lb 2oz at 39.5 weeks; not an alarmingly small size, but much too light for her measurements – she was in fact a very long baby.
Kaitlyn’s story is heartbreakingly brief, and yet she has touched so many people’s lives. When something like this happens, it’s remarkable how many people start to share stories of their own, their relatives and their friends. I had no idea how many people are affected by stillbirth and neonatal death; they are still not topics that people really hear about until they have personal experience. By sharing Kaitlyn’s story, our story, I hope to be part of the effort to raise awareness more broadly about the devastating impact of stillbirth, about grief at the loss of a child and about Fetal Vascular Malperfusion and placental issues in pregnancy. When Kaitlyn was born I promised that I would continue creating her impression upon the world, as she can’t do it through her own life. Keeping Kaitlyn’s memory alive within our family and creating her legacy are the only ways in which we can now parent our beautiful girl.
A Keepsake for Kaitlyn 